Judge denies request by Elon Musk’s xAI to pause Minnesota nudification ban
A federal judge on Friday denied a request from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI to block a Minnesota law that will be the first in the nation to ban nudification technology.
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U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank ruled that there was little risk of immediate harm from the law going into effect as scheduled on Saturday, despite a lawsuit this week from xAI claiming that the law violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
“xAI filed the motion on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect. Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate,” the judge wrote , denying xAI’s request for a pause to the law.
The court could still pause the law at a later time. The judge wrote that he’ll hold a hearing on Aug. 19 on whether to grant a preliminary injunction.
The law, which was signed by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz in May, prohibits a person who owns or controls a website, application or software to allow their users to “nudify” images of others. It also prohibits anyone from advertising nudification capabilities.
In its lawsuit filed Monday, Musk’s company did not dispute Minnesota’s interest in banning nudification websites and apps, but said: “The law is overinclusive and there are far less restrictive alternatives that function to achieve the same ends.”
Grok, one of xAI’s products, has faced severe scrutiny for its ‘Imagine’ feature that uses AI to generate and edit images and videos of users. After the release of a December model, Grok began producing sexualized deepfakes of people with less clothing at the request of users on a massive scale, prompting worldwide outcry and investigations in several jurisdictions. In January, Apple threatened to remove Grok from its app store unless it made changes.
As recently as April, Grok was continuing to generate sexualized images of people without their consent, as users tried to break through restrictions that xAI put in place in January.
Minnesota’s law defines a “nudified” image or video as something that has been “altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual.”
The law applies only when “the altered or generated image or video is so realistic that a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual.”In response to the lawsuit, Walz said “See you in court, creep” in an X post Tuesday.
Violating Minnesota’s law could result in a civil penalty of up to $500,000 “for each unlawful access, download or use,” in addition to civil penalties for mental anguish, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, or “other relief the court deems just and equitable.” The law says the state’s attorney general may enforce it and that victims may sue on their own. The law does not include criminal penalties.
Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, on Friday, arguing for the court to deny xAI’s temporary restraining order, convert it into a preliminary injunction motion, and proceed from there. Ellison argued that xAI waited too long — three months after the law was passed — to file an emergency delay, and that their “voluntary delay should not create a manufactured emergency for the Attorney General or the Court.”
xAI’s criticism of the law is drawing support from some free speech advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, which supported passage of the law in an earlier form in February but has since turned against it.
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“While we believe that creating the technology to alter or ‘nudify’ photos of identifiable people is protected by the First Amendment, we also recognize that the non-consensual creation and dissemination of such material can inflict damage on people appearing in those images,” the ACLU of Minnesota said in a statement Friday.
“In engaging with lawmakers on this issue, we hoped to strike an appropriate balance between First Amendment rights and the ability of people harmed to seek remedial measures, not unlike the remedies available to people harmed by defamation. The final version of the bill does not strike that balance,” the organization said.
xAI argued that it already prohibits users “from generating nude or sexualized images of people without their consent.”
SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, faces class action lawsuits from plaintiffs who claim Grok’s AI chatbot created or shared nude deepfakes of them as children or as adults. The lawsuits also say that xAI failed to alert authorities to the alleged perpetrators who used the tool to create their nude deepfakes.
Minnesota’s law came among wider efforts to regulate AI platforms that can generate deepfakes. In July, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent Apple and Google cease and desist letters demanding they remove nudification apps from their app stores.
xAI’s lawsuit argued that creating images and videos using Grok Imagine is a protected First Amendment activity, and that Minnesota’s law did not provide a “safe harbor for good-faith efforts,” for companies to avoid nudification efforts.
“Liability attaches even if the depicted persons consented — or created the image themselves — and even if the image is never shared,” xAI’s lawsuit said. “Liability also attaches even if the image has artistic, scientific, political, satirical, educational, medical, or religious value, and (again) even if the company has deployed near-perfect, state-of the-art technical controls to prevent the generation of nude images.”
The lawsuit included several examples of screenshots that it said would be banned under Minnesota’s law including one image shared by President Donald Trump showing him and other lawmakers floating shirtless in the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group, said it agreed that the state law is overly broad.
“Minnesota’s law is supposed to stop AI-generated nude images, but it’s written so broadly that it could end up covering benign political memes too, like President Trump in a bikini or former President Obama in hotpants,” John Coleman, legislative council for AI and free expression at the foundation, said in a statement. “That goes far beyond prohibiting unlawful content like child sexual abuse material, which is already illegal. Instead, it sweeps in ordinary political speech and satire that Americans create and share online every day.”
“Americans have a First Amendment right to joke about, criticize, and parody public figures. A law that reaches that expression deserves to be struck down by the courts,” Coleman said.
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